The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has taken the unusual step of making a $52 million equity investment in CureVac GmbH of Germany which has technology for making prophylactic vaccines that don’t require cold chain storage and distribution. The technology is based on messenger RNA.
Denmark-based Genmab A/S and BioNovion BV of the Netherlands have upgraded a research agreement in oncology to a full co-development and commercialisation deal in order to progress work on candidate bispecific antibody products that inhibit immune checkpoints.
Enrolment has stopped in a Wellcome Trust-funded trial of an experimental treatment for the Ebola virus in Liberia following a significant fall in new cases of the infection, the Trust announced on 3 February. The drug’s producer, Chimerix Inc, had previously said it would no longer support the trial.
GlaxoSmithKline Plc said a Phase 3 trial of its candidate vaccine against the Ebola virus is set to start in Liberia in the coming weeks, subject to regulatory approval. The trial is being led by the US National Institutes of Health, which is a co-developer of the vaccine.
AM-Pharma BV of the Netherlands has received regulatory approval to conduct a Phase 2 trial of its product for acute kidney injury using an adaptive trial design that is intended to establish the m
Eight projects aimed at tackling the health crisis in west Africa caused by the spread of the Ebola virus have been jointly announced by the Innovative Medicines Initiative and the European industry federation, Efpia, in Brussels.
AstraZeneca Plc said that an outcomes study of its cardiovascular drug Brilinta (ticagrelor) has shown the treatment to be effective in preventing a recurrence of disease in patients with a history of heart attack. The trial examined the drug at two different doses with aspirin in 21,000 patients.
Roche has halted a Phase 3 trial of the monoclonal antibody gantenerumab in prodromal Alzheimer’s disease patients based on a pre-planned futility analysis. No new safety signals were observed in the trial, which was called SCarletRoAD.
The UK antibody developer Kymab Ltd is to lead a consortium of public institutions with expertise in public health to discover a new treatment for infection from the Ebola virus which is spreading through west Africa. The goal is to produce an antibody-based medicine.
The Novartis cancer drug Afinitor (everolimus) has failed to show statistical significance in a group of patients with HER2 positive advanced breast cancer. The Phase 3 trial was investigating the drug as a first-line treatment in combination with trastuzumab and paclitaxel.